The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Our mission is to acknowledge, foster, and support thoughtful, articulate, and creative blogs built on an appreciation of the horror and sci-horror genres.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals, from all walks of life, who keep the genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long hours to keep their blogs informative and fun, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality, culture and knowledge freely to fans of a genre difficult to describe, and fun to fear.

We honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all its wonderfully frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers are bloggers who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging to reach the heights of horrifying excellence. We know what rapture it is to sip tana tea in the full moon light, and feel the thrill of walking the dark passageways in cinema and literature, searching for the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous. For the fun of it.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT D is coming for you!

--jmcozzoli, Zombos' Closet of Horror

October 20, 2009

Pick a Post Sensation 18: Favorite Novels

Beware!

The members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to uncover their favorite novels for your edification pleasure and horrific delight.

...A couple days ago I finished rereading Stephen King's The Stand for the fourth time, I think. If it's not his best book it's in the top two, and it has the added bonus of boasting the best film adaptation of any of King's works. That's not to say that the TV miniseries of The Stand is better than Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, of course, just that it's a better adaptation.

...World War Z takes the zombie setting and presents it as though it’s a retrospective piece of nonfiction. It takes place an unspecified number of years after a zombie plague outbreak greatly reduces the world population and is then brought under control. While it’s certainly a pulpy read and presented in a series of interviews with fictional survivors, it goes at the setting from the perspective of an author who studied at the same school of the living dead that I did.

...There is an unexpected advantage to being my age. I’ve been around, sure, but there is still so much outside my footprint. I’ve got feelers out everywhere, normally yielding at least a geographical plotting of everything in the arena even if I never take he/she/it one on one, but from time to time something I had no inkling even existed blindsides my radar and when that happens I feel like Jed Clampett. A month ago I had never heard of Dan Simmons. After having finished his early ’90s novel SUMMER OF NIGHT, I can declare full bore that I am now seeking out every syllable the man has ever put his name on.

Lost Higway finds The Drive-In, a B-movie with blood-topped popcorn, made in Texas!

...I've always had a fascination with the drive-in culture and mythos. Those times of watching a great b-movie out under the stars and making that long walk to the snack shop for that buttery snack are some of my best teenage memories. I've gathered quite a few books about their history so a few years back when I ran across a novel with the "Drive-in" in it's title, I had to give it read.

It's described as a living B-movie where the patrons of a drive-in become characters in a b-movie and are being directed by some malevolent alien forces. That sounded like fun campy storytelling to me and even it's book cover suggested a sort of "Hitchhiker's Guide" silliness. Don't be fooled. This book is dark, twisted and bleak Blood cults, cannibalism and the worse of humanity take root as societal norms break down and the horrifying popcorn king begins it's reign of terror. Lansdale's descriptive storytelling and compelling characters made it's somber outlook on society all that more visceral to me. I found myself more trying to endure it's twisted story than be entertained by it. I even had to take a break and watch a sitcom just to have a warm fuzzy feeling again. Retroman Steve says check it out, but you'll likely never look at drive-in popcorn the same way again.

...When I was quite young, I was busy voraciously reading Stephen King when I happened upon this book at the book store and thought it looked right up my alley.

Ghost Story [by Peter Straub] is the slowly unwinding tale of a group of elderly men who have grown up together in a bucolic upstate New York town, and who keep themselves busy by getting together frequently to exchange frightening stories. They call themselves 'The Chowder Society' and they have a secret from their youth that is the basis of the supernatural horror that crawls under your skin while reading this book.

When the men were young, they were enamored with a young woman names Eva Galli. They spent all their time with her, until one fateful night, she is accidentally hit on the head. Believing her dead, they panic - no one wants to ruin their bright future, so they stuff her in a car and send it into the lake. Unfortunately, their medical knowledge is not top notch, and as the car is sinking they see something so terrifying they are scarred for life, each of them. Eva, at the rear window of the car, is not dead. Her bizarre grin is in full view as the car sinks out of sight.

Many years later, Eva re-surfaces as Alma, and when one of the men dies of fright, his fellow accomplice's trepidation turns into intense fear as each man struggles to defeat the evil. To tell more would ruin the satisfaction someone could get from reading this story for the first time. I know when I did, it was something that I won't forget.